LibreOffice mascot survey: The progress so far

As you’ve no doubt seen, over the last few months we’ve been looking for a LibreOffice mascot. This is just something fun for our community to use, for instance on T-shirts at events, so it doesn’t have to be ultra slick and professional – it isn’t a replacement for the official branding and logos that we use in the software, website and marketing materials. At the start, we asked for your submissions and received over 300 of them – thank you so much to everyone who contributed!

Many of them were excellent, but we had to remove quite a few from the following voting round for various reasons (such as potential copyright issues, conflicts with other FOSS projects, and use of the official LibreOffice document logo). If your submission didn’t make it to the voting round, we still really appreciate your input, and we apologies if we didn’t make it clearer why some didn’t get through!

After the voting phase, we took the top 12 and decided to put them through an “iteration” phase on an image board – to get further feedback and ideas. We hoped this would work, but unfortunately we ended up being overloaded with spam, trolls, flame wars and denial of service attacks. There are certainly some things we could have done and communicated better, but the attacks sadly meant we had to close this phase early.

Anyway, we now move on to the final phase, in which TDF Members and the Board of Directors choose the final mascot. Once again, we really appreciate all the input we’ve had over the last few months, and we’re sorry if some things didn’t run so smoothly and we should’ve communicated more. It’s a learning process for all of us! We’re doing our best – stay tuned for the final result soon…

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“spam, trolls, flame wars and denial of service attacks.”
Seriously? Do you call a constructive critique attacks?
To clear things up: people were upset, because final 12 mascots were in low quality. Many of them were plagiarized straight from the stock images/clipart. Other weren’t better, because all of them presented really low skill in character design.

Mascot should be designed by an artist, some who is good at character design. It can’t be just some simple vectors traced on reference or a bad drawing without any sense of anatomy.

That’s why people are unhappy. Contest should be targeted for artists.

Also there are concerns, that the voting system didn’t work as intended and could be open for abuses.

Well.
I dont wanna to be to harsh.
But being overloaded with spam, trolls, flame wars and denial of service attacks is the reaction for badly organised competition.

First of all rules at beginning were not fully clear. And because of that some nice mascots with potential (For example parrot cockatiel thingy) were disqualified at beggining.

Second, the quality round 1. There was literally not much problem to vote over and over. But well if someone really has that kind of dedication to vote over and over for his favourite mascot that means he must really like it.

Also you refused to show vote results from round 1, this is what i call a real fuel for conspiracy theories (Especially when mascots with great reputation over internet, like libbie, didn’t made to round 2)

Third: The quality of mascots in round 2 actually people didn’t really believed these one got most votes (What means more fuel for conspiracy theories especially when you refused to show vote results from round 1). Also people instantly proved 2 of round 2 mascots were recolored versions of already existing images, so that made people more angry (Especially when you told why parrot cockatiel was removed).

So juest because of way you host the competition just made people mad (and add also well fueled conspiracy theories) and bam, people from some sites like 4chan decided to rally and simply sabotage mascot competition. So you just got wake-up slap from the community.

Also the fact what are you doing now will make just people more angry.

So the best what is to do is to stop this competition and just begin from scratch but without mistakes you made.

Also one thing. Remember Mascot is not a logo. And logo is not a mascot.
And mascot needs to have a character, mascot MUST BE A CHARACTER, and most of hummingbirds were just nothing byt logos-simple symbols.

I hope you will listen and consider this message so you will avoid even more dissatisfaction from community.

It seems many of the finalists are plagiarized. How did this pass through inspection? It’s not possible to know every logo in the world, but this is a majority of them being plagiarized. The owl should have been the most obvious rip off of Duolingo.

Yeah, choose one of your ugly scribblings then, print it, and hang it next to the drawings of your kindergarden kids. No one will ever use them practically, but instead rather use others, like Libbie – no matter if it’s official or unofficial or whatever.

If it matters I think all was good. No complaints regarding the contest rules or how things have been organized. I’ve submitted to a lot of contests over the years and none of those where perfect. I also have seen this system before, where public votes the entries, and nobody died because of it. I am pretty sure after the winners will be announced there will be another wave of frustration and hate. In all of the negative, sarcastic and biased comments I think you guys should know that there are some people happy with how things went.

Everything about how the Document Foundation has approached this supposedly “democratic” process has been opaque and unclear. Original vote tallies for each submission have not been supplied, despite the Document Foundation demonstrating they have them by providing an official vote tally to OMGUbuntu. Many of the submissions that made it to the final 12 round were either small modifications of existing logos or copied wholesale from available online images. Some submissions that were considered popular in the earlier phases were rejected for reasons as arbitrary as using the LibreOffice logo for a LibreOffice logo design contest.

When people dared to communicate their displeasure with the Document Foundation’s decisions on the incredibly slow booru instance that was provided for voting you had the audacity to make complaining impossible. When actually popular submissions were uploaded to the booru instance alongside the chosen finalists, people voted for them heavily, but the Document Foundation decided to purge all accounts created at that time, wipe the imageboard, and lock uploads. When people coordinated their voting online in protest of these decisions*, by voting for one submission and against all the rest, the one submission was removed by the administrators. When people added tags to communicate displeasure at the available choices, the admins began regularly deleting tags. And when the admins realized that all their submissions were sitting around a -50 vote count or lower, the admins closed the imageboard and banned voting entirely, citing the dissatisfied LibreOffice users’ complaints as “attacks” of “spam, trolls, flame wars and denial of service attacks.”

All of these claims are patently false. For many people to choose to participate in voting is not evidence of “spam”. For many people to protest in a way you didn’t anticipate is not evidence of “trolls”. There were literally no “flame wars” or anything remotely resembling them in the comments section, unless you’re willing to count things as simple as “I disagree” as “flaming”. And the only denial of service that occurred was a result of the underpowered server hosting the imageboard being inadequate for the number of people who wanted to participate in the vote.

I don’t know what the future holds for LibreOffice, and frankly I don’t care. I have uninstalled LibreOffice [https://i.imgur.com/WJU4s0u.png] and have no plans to use it again. I wish whatever mascot your committee appoints as the winner of the vote all the best in the future.

*Coordinated voting is not wrong; as a matter of fact, it’s how democratic voting is run everywhere. Without coordinated voting, it’s impossible for regular people to find likeminded individuals and discuss what actions should be taken in order to communicate with those in power and change the system for the better.

This entire thing has been a disgrace from start to finish. You went behind everyones back and iterated on one of the octopus designs mid contest but didn’t allow one of the more professional designs (cockatoo) to iterate on his to remove the TLD icon, even when he showed it can work without it. More than one had the TLD logo and was painted over, verus being immediately disqualified while others go on to become finals. Are you serious?

I wasn’t even participating in the contest, merely an onlooker, but your company TLD puts such a bad taste in my mouth from the shady behavior from TLD, so I’m cutting all ties with Libre Office on my computers. The contest should have been transparent, with rules upfront and instead we got hidden votes and lied to. There’s no possible way that Libbie did worse than the knock-off of Libbie (which only happened because Tyson posted his on twitter months ago) but that’s what you say happened. No one believes you, your credibility is in the gutter… It’s more like the stockholders that was mentioned pulled the plug. You actually came close to using plagiarized work from shutterstock and the finals “line up” still has trace jobs a plenty.

And now you are going to cut all ties with the community and do it all behind closed doors, well you’ve already failed to be transparent in every way. You failed to convey the contest properly, it’s asinine to punish the contest entries over your own mistakes and all I can see is a desire to rush to the finish and put it behind you, instead of aiming for a quality result. What should have happened is allowing everyone in the contest at least 1 revision, instead of this bull that reeks of a rigged contest.

You can’t even get a simple contest right, what reason would anyone have faith in you being trustworthy and honest on anything else?

If The Document Foundation really was a company, nobody in that company would give a shit about what you think the mascot should be. But it isn’t. They care. It’s a non-profit organization based in Germany.

You can waste money printing tshirt if you want, for me Libbie if the official mascot (she get the highest score before you deleted her).
Libreoffice is a community project and you shouldnt forget that, it pretty obvious than the community choose Libbie, we shouldn’t care about your decision.

The way this contest has been handled sort of makes me lose a lot of confidence in LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. Very disappointing since I initially supported LibreOffice, had planned to download it in place of Google Drive/Microsoft Office, and thought it was awesome that there was a contest for a mascot in the first place. But if you’re supposed to be based on people working together to make things free and available, you don’t make a public contest for something and then change the rules/cut off comments/end voting because of concerns about the way you handled things in the first place . If you guys were going to pick and choose from the results, all you had to do was say that in the first place and present the contest as just a way for people to tell you guys which ones they liked. But no, you presented it as ‘like our goal/mission, it’s for the people’, then went against everything your own contest stood for. I’m sorry, but I don’t really have much faith in this foundation’s intentions anymore. I’ll be looking for other open source alternatives, and until I find one, I’ll stick with Google Drive. Free, and at least they don’t fake caring.

TDF, please apologize and use Libbie, it’s _by_far_ the best mascot you received, with absolutely no doubt. Downsizing really isn’t that important, you won’t need Libbie 8×8. And if you really need this, the author may create you a stylized variant. But you owe him a big apology, there’s no doubt!

And think of all the kid’s sympathies, LO could earn. Everybody here wants LO to win over MSO. This way you’ll especially reach pupils and students way better, because they judge by optics first, not by function or politics. And we surely need more young people using free software!

Most of the ones you choose are quite horrible: not pleasing to the eye, badly designed, ripped off from drawing/colouring books, recolours of stock images, etc.
One artist literally made all the work for you! A nice character (perhaps a bit hard to read, but really nice none the less), different versions for each aspect of the LibreOffice applications, different colours… and you only showed one of the images he made! And all the other designs (completely horrible in comparison) stayed? Half of those (including the previously mentioned flaws) were more of a logo than a mascot.

You suck, if you ask me. I thought I’d give LibreOffice another chance (since I wasn’t satisfied the first time around), now I won’t: If something has such an incompetent team involved, is not worth it.

The way this contest has been handled sort of makes me lose a lot of confidence in LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. Very disappointing since I initially supported LibreOffice, had planned to download it in place of Google Drive/Microsoft Office, and thought it was awesome that there was a contest for a mascot in the first place. But if you’re supposed to be based on people working together to make things free and available, you don’t make a public contest for something and then change the rules/cut off comments/end voting because of concerns about the way you handled things in the first place . If you guys were going to pick and choose from the results, all you had to do was say that in the first place and present the contest as just a way for people to tell you guys which ones they liked. But no, you presented it as ‘like our goal/mission, it’s for the people’, then went against everything your own contest stood for. I’m sorry, but I don’t really have much faith in this foundation’s intentions anymore. I’ll be looking for other open source alternatives, and until I find one, I’ll stick with Google Drive. Free, and at least they don’t fake caring.الموقع الأول للدراسةBitcoin

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